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A History of Unrest

It's easy to forget that labour issues have been central to the business of
making games from the very beginning. Easter eggs, now a widely-known phenomenon
in games, initially emerged from issues around crediting and disputes between
workers and management at game companies.

Warren Robinett was developing Adventure at Atari in the late 70s. At that time,
it was typical for studios to suppress any attribution for the games they
released to prevent competitors from poaching their talent (and to make it
harder for workers to establish a provable portfolio of work to get hired
elsewhere or develop a reputation of auteurship). In protest, Robinett
introduced an additional room to the game, carefully hiding it behind a
convoluted series of tasks so that it wouldn't be discovered until after
release, that would display the words "Created by Warren Robinett."

When the Easter egg was discovered by Atari, Robinett had already left the
company, but that didn't stop them from devoting development resources to
uncovering the offending code. However, Brad Stewart, the Atari employee who
tracked down the code in question, said that if he were to fix it, he'd just
change the message in the game to say "Fixed by Brad Stewart" instead.
Eventually, Atari management decided that Easter eggs should be permitted, and
even encouraged developers to add them as a way to increase playtime and give
players more value — but they generally limited them to developers' initials
rather than full
names.

Developers have never really stopped hiding messages in games as protest or in
hidden resistance. In the Italian translation of Final Fantasy VIII, when the
"Scan" spell is cast on a placeholder debug
enemy, a message is
shown written by the translator themself: "This translation is killing me. It's
almost 2 in the morning. I'm tired!!!! I'm tired!!!!"